Principal Software Engineer

Senior Software Engineer, Java/Python (Bangalore, Remote option available)

4+ years of experience 

Zepto 

Why should you look at this role?

Salary 40-55 lakh per annum

Paid leave

Sick leave

Provident Fund

What Else?

• High growth startup in quick commerce space (10 min delivery)
• Given our very high hiring bar, we offer a very competitive salary and substantial equity to create everlasting wealth for our early believers as the company grows.
• Work on real world logistics problems & benefit from the rocket ship Zepto is!

Tech Team: 40-50 (200+ in few months)

About the Employer

Zepto is a fast-growing startup that delivers products in 10 minutes through an optimised network of dark stores that we're building across the country!

Just 6 months after launching, we've raised $160 million from marquee

investors in Silicon Valley and India. Our investors include Y Combinator, Nexus Venture Partners, and many more! We’ve built out one of the best startup teams in India, with Senior Executives from Uber, Flipkart, Dream11, PhonePe, Goldman Sachs, Pepperfry, and institutions like Stanford, INSEAD, IITs, and IIMs.

The magic of Zepto is our ability to consistently deliver 2,500+ products in 10 minutes flat. It's the core of what we do, and the reason why we’ve been able to grow so fast with phenomenal customer love. Our mission is simple: to make 10-minute delivery the new normal.

Funding:

Funding Zepto has raised a total of $160M in funding over 3 rounds.

Their latest funding was raised on Dec 20, 2021 from a Series C round.

Employer Reviews:

“High Ownership, Lots of Learning, Broad Roles, Accessible Leaders”

"Alot of benefits like ZeptoJoy coupon, internet bill reimbursement and cab reimbursement is also taken care of. Overtime is paid."

Reporting structure:

Software Engineer -> Sr Software Engineer -> Lead -> EM -> AD / Director / VP -> Head of Engineering -> CTO

This role would be by and large a Individual Contributor role.

Interview Process:

• Round 1. Problem Solving + CS Fundamentals (60 mins)
  • DS/Algo Problems (30 mins) - You can expect 1-2 Leetcode easy/medium questions
  • CS Fundamentals (30 mins)
• Round 2. Low Level Design (60 mins)
  • You would be given a trivial problem and expected to work through the low level design viz class structure, interfaces, db data models etc.
• Round 3. High Level Design (60 mins)
  • You will be given a trivial problem, where we would work with you to design the system for the problem statement. We expect the detailed flow of the Functionality
    • Extract APIs, if any
    • Database choices
    • Schema design and Scale the system, if time permits

What You will do Everyday?

• Work very closely with the Tech Leadership and lead end-to-end development.
• Closely collaborate with product, design and business teams to understand product ideas and business needs and help deliver these as a series of ultra fast experiments.
• Architect and implement backend services with high reliability and scalability.
• Contribute to system architecture and database design.
• Set up best practices for development and champion their adoption.
• Write quality documentation and handle conflicts well to build consensus.
• Learn about new technologies and incorporate them.
• Mentor young minds and foster team spirit

Your Superpowers

• 4+ years of experience with Java frameworks like Spring / Dropwizard/Play or Python frameworks like Django/Flask/FastApi and databases like PostgreSQL/MySQL/MongoDB
• Experience in building highly scalable customer-facing applications that involve implementing complex business flows and dealing with an ever-increasing scale
• Extensive experience in object-oriented design skills, knowledge of design patterns, and huge passion and ability to design intuitive module and class-level interfaces.
• Experience in service-oriented architecture design.
• Experience building at least one application from scratch.
• Experience with cache store/message broker like Redis / RabbitMQ/Kafka
• Interest in learning new languages/framework as needed.
• Worked in a startup environment with high levels of ownership and commitment.
• A growth mindset and passionate about building things from the ground up and most importantly, you should be fun to work with.

• Building components for the company’s advanced health tech platform using Java, Solr, SpringBoot, DialogFlow
• Communicating effectively in a cross-functional product development team and presenting ideas and solutions effectively
• Prioritizing and managing workload and meeting critical project milestones and deadlines
• Effectively collaborating with a team as well as taking initiative and working independently to solve problems

Desired Candidate Profile

• 2+ years of experience on Java, Spring Boot, Hibernate in medium to large-scale projects
• Must have experience with at least some flavours of both SQL (MySQL, Postgres) and NoSQL (Kafka, MongoDB, ElasticSearch, NoSQL distributed cache system, DynamoDB etc), datastores in production
• Must have experience with Kafka or similar message queue systems in production
• Stellar problem solving skills
• Hunger to learn new things and ability to grasp new concepts quickly
• Ability to move quickly without breaking things too much (we are dreamers)
• Ability to work under immense pressure which is balanced by a sense of responsibility and ownership
• Should be able to groom juniors and take them to the next level

Responsibilities

• You will design and develop large scale distributed services
• You will analyse and improve the efficiency, scalability, stability, and security of the platform as a whole.
• You will act as the primary owner of one or more components while driving innovation in your area of ownership
• You will proactively research & evaluate new tools, technologies, and techniques to improve the value of the system.
• You will work with engineering leadership in solving and architecting solutions for challenging or complex development issues.
• You will work independently and handle dependencies with very minimal oversight
• You will take initiatives in developing and maintaining integrations of best practices within the back-end.
• You will help identify systemic issues, performance bottlenecks and work on design/architect improvements.

Requirements

• You have 1 - 9 years of experience in software development.
• You have designed and scaled up the system.
• You have a strong understanding of Data Structures and Algorithms.
• You are an incessant problem solver and tougher the problem gets, more fun you have.
• You have strong command in any one or more of the following languages: Python and Django
• You understand the business impact of your decisions.

Good To Have

• You have prior experience in fintech companies

Traits We Are Looking For

• Experience in a specific tech stack doesn't matter for us.
• The general engineering mindset and aptitude is what matters more.
• Technically strong and curious.
• Should have a hacker mindset and should love exploring new technologies.

Desired Skills and Experience

Java, Python, Data Structures, Algorithms

Technologies

Must have                         Core JAVA, J2EE, Multithreading, OOPS, and Multiprocessing

Great to have                   RabbitMQ, Netty, XML, JSON, Messagepack

Huge Advantage:             Good at mathematics, statistics, complex data structures, algorithms, and design patterns

Other skills

• Ability to understand most complex and challenging problems and solve them from users’ view point
• Ability to create and present software designs (as per the aligned solution) to the product owner
• Ability to build and create modules from scratch.
• Ability to write, understand and deal with large code base
• Experience in understanding and implementing design patterns
• Ability to provide technical leadership to a team of equally talented, efficient and motivated engineers

Roles and responsibilities

• Responsible for solving the most complex and seemingly impossible problems related to variety of dimensions of software engineering. Dealing with Big Data to Complex Data Structures, From Inter Process Communication to sub 100 MilliSec server responses, From Distributed Systems to 99.999 Availability.
• Responsible for providing technical leadership to a team of 3-4 Engineers
• Responsible to drive delivery of a project/module and report to Product Owner
• Responsible for functional/technical tracking of a project/module

Responsibility Split

• 80% Technology, 20% Team management
• With 80:20 split this is definitely a technology oriented role suitable for geeks.